tough draw?

Youzhny, Nalbandian, Djokovic and Federer.
Thats how Nadal's route to French Open title will look, i.e of course if others mentioned don't lose before.

But not much of that happening to Federer who has been blessed with almost a free ride to the final, with only worthwhile opponents he may meet before being David Ferrer in Semi-finals. Actually even his is slightly better compared to Djokovic, who has a walk in the park.

Contrast that with Nadal's, tough draw gets a whole new meaning. Murray, Youzhny, Nalbandian! So even if Djokovic doesn't finish him off in semi-finals, he will ensure Federer will have a complete worn-out Nadal to pick off. Unless of course Nadal plays exceptionally brilliant to win all the before matches in 3 sets. In which case one may say he still has a chance. But what are the chances of that happening? What with he not being at his physical best, suffering from a hamstring injury that he got while defeating Federer at Hamburg last week.

But wouldn't it be just brilliant if with all that somehow he manages to retain the title? And stay undefeated at the Roland Garros. That i think would be amazing, if through the entire career one can stay undefeated at a Grand Slam. I'm not aware if anyone has done it before?

Anyways thats a dream, what with fate almost conspiring that it never happens, with the draw and the injury.

few linux pains....

Yesterday i was trying to get microphone working on my opensuse 10.3 box, with Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller soundcard. And this post is about the pains i encountered during it.
After running alsaconf, 'n messing around with alsamixer settings for some time, realized it wasn't going to be such an easy job. Then tried the YaST sound, but even after much permutations/combinations with soundcard parameters that google threw up, it failed to configure. So after some more googling, failed to give any concrete solution, thought let me upgrade alsa.
And thats when my troubles started or so i think it did, since 'm not still aware what is the root cause.
> downloaded all the alsa-10.6 packages from the website.
> configure, make and install goes through without an itch
> reboot
> I try logging in and lo it throws up the usual gnome error box of 'your session lasted less than 10s, if you haven't logged out yourself...blah...blah'.

Clicking on the details, gave me some sabayon failures in the log which didn't make any sense to me. So after googling and asking around few colleagues, came to know sabayon can be safely removed without doing much harm. Wait i forgot to mention, before you think that i was stuck to command line, there is a surprise, when i tried root or any other user, the log-in went through just fine. So me was left scratching my head, as what could be the problem, since if it was alsa, i think everything should've cribbed right?
Well anyways so removed sabayon 'n the gnome_admin which depended on sabayon, (btw its interesting what all you learn, 'coz of this i came to know there's something called these two, 'n they take care of user profiles 'n such). And anyone would be forgiven to think it would work after this, but life is never so simple...is it? So the sabayon errors go, but the log-in still fails. And now 'm at wits end, as it doesn't even hint at whats the problem.
And this is the account which had all my development environment, music, mail, browser, compiz fusion settings...everything. Now importing all those profiles into a new user acc...not a job one would fancy.
So was trying to think of easier way out, so then since it looked like some issue with user profile, thought if i create a new user and point the home directory to this, it should work. Wishful thinking. :( Didn't make any difference except waste my time. And all this happened yesterday night, so today morning thought no point wasting more of my time, so did what i should've done longtime back, copied the data, profiles etc.

But the issue still remains and can't even file a bug, as i don't know what to file against. Not knowing whats the issue seriously pains. So now 'm throwing it up as an open challenge, so if there is someone who can't resist such a puzzling one - solution, pointers to solution, debugging...nething is most welcome :).

'n here's the very detailed informative message i get -
/etc/X11/xim: Checking whether an input method should be started.
/etc/X11/xim: user environment variable LANG=en_US.UTF-8
sourcing /etc/sysconfig/language to get the value of INPUT_METHOD
INPUT_METHOD is not set or empty (no user selected input method).
Trying to start a default input method for the locale en_US.UTF-8 ...
There is no default input method for the current locale.
SESSION_MANAGER=local/puthali-test:/tmp/.ICE-unix/17148

'n btw before there used to be sabayon error messages between the default input and SESSION_MANAGER lines.

'n yea, the whole reason this whole thing started - microphone, i just checked it is working. But it hadn't when i checked last night, life mysteries what can i say...

Share with a note

what a nice surprise i had just a few minutes back!
I finally get to see the feature i wanted since i started using google reader! :)
more specifically just beside the 'Share', you now see a 'Share with note'. Ain't that cool?
Whenever i shared an item before, I always wished there was a way to share my views/thoughts on it...ain't that the whole point of sharing? :)
But yea now you can! :D

Pls: Whats pending is the ability to have discussions, which i believe is coming soon. :)